Reading… and Thinking

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

— 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (ESV)

In this same letter, Paul tells us about the experiences he calls “light momentary affliction”:

• In chapter 1 he describes his recent experience in Ephesus this way: “For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” (1:8-9)
• And in chapter 11, he catalogs what he’s gone through during the previous few years: “Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.” (11:24-27)

There are times when the Word of God shouts, times when it whispers. The tone can be pleading, threatening, matter-of-fact, poignant, ironic. It these few verses from chapter 4, it is utterly eloquent.

How do you describe the glory that is to be ours? As Paul says, it is “beyond all comparison”. We can’t get our minds around it. But Paul is able to convey a sense of its greatness, by setting it alongside his suffering. Seen side-by-side next to the glory, the constant deprivation and threats of imminent death are “slight momentary afflictions”. Being stoned or flogged is essentially equal to getting a splinter, he says—if you step back and look at the immense mass of the glory that is to be ours.

How many of Paul’s readers over the centuries have been immediately conscious of “the outer self wasting away”? Disease and age will certainly do us all in, if trauma doesn’t get us first. One of Paul’s major themes in 2 Corinthians is “comfort”. He doesn’t use the word here, but there is no more eloquent expression of comfort in the Bible. No one could say that Paul didn’t know what pain was, what loss was, what ongoing infirmity was. But it’s all over in a moment, Paul says. Whereas the glory will last forever! Hang on, he exhorts us. Rest easy—the glory is on its way.